Microsoft Clarity alternatives: what free is for — and where it stops
Last reviewed: 28 July 2026. Every Microsoft Clarity fact below was read from Microsoft's own surfaces — learn.microsoft.com/clarity, clarity.microsoft.com and the Shopify App Store listing — on 26 July 2026, with the Terms of Use quotes re-confirmed in a browser on 28 July 2026. Nothing comes from a rival's comparison page.
The verdict
What Clarity does well — be clear about this first
Most "Clarity alternatives" pages start by damning it with faint praise. The facts point the other way. All of this is from Microsoft's own documentation:
- Free, forever, at any scale. "There are absolutely no limits on the number of sites per account" and "there are no traffic limits on these sites." Clarity processes "more than 1 petabyte of data from over 100 million users per month."
- No sampling on capture. "No sampling (that is, tracking only a portion of your site's traffic)." Every session is tracked — the objection people raise against metered tools doesn't apply here.
- Unlimited team members. An agency can put Clarity on every client site for $0 and give the whole team access. No paid tool in this category comes close on that arithmetic.
- Real mobile-app SDKs — Android, iOS, Flutter, React Native, Cordova/Ionic. Mtrix has no native app SDK; if you need in-app replay, Clarity has an answer and Mtrix doesn't.
- Copilot included — chat over your data, session and heatmap summaries, at no cost.
- It ships constantly. In the last three months alone, Microsoft's own blog lists Topic Insights, AI citation analytics, bot-activity upgrades and a beta on-site AI shopping assistant for Shopify and WooCommerce stores. Clarity is not a maintenance-mode freebie.
- A one-click Shopify app — "Microsoft Clarity: AI Insights," rated 4.6 across 1,719 reviews.
For a store under roughly $1M in revenue, Clarity plus Shopify's own analytics is a defensible, complete stack. That is a smaller-budget answer than anything else on this page, including Mtrix.
The four walls, in the order you'll hit them
Each of these is an absence of a documented feature, sourced from Microsoft's own pages — not a claim about quality.
1. You can see the problem. You cannot test the fix. Clarity has no test-creation feature — no variant builder, no traffic allocation, no significance reporting. Its own positioning is to analyse tests you run elsewhere: an Experiments filter with integrations for AB Tasty and Optimizely. So the moment a heatmap shows you a dead zone above your add-to-cart, the workflow is: buy a second tool, wire the two together, run the test there, and come back to Clarity to watch it. The diagnosis is free. The loop is not.
2. Purchases are a percentage, never money. Clarity's e-commerce metric is "the percentage of all site sessions resulting in a successful purchase" — a rate. Funnels report conversion rate, sessions converted and median time to convert. Nothing in the documented dashboard or export carries order value, AOV or revenue. And the ecommerce depth is platform-gated: "The Purchases feature is only available on Clarity projects of Shopify sites. Checkout Abandonment feature is only available on Clarity projects of Shopify Plus sites." You can watch a session rage-click; you cannot see what it cost you.
3. Recordings age out in 30 days. Playback retention is 30 days; favourited sessions and "a randomly selected sample of recordings" survive up to 9 months, as does aggregated dashboard and heatmap data. Your Black Friday recordings are gone by Christmas. Two more of Microsoft's own qualifiers matter here: "Clarity tracks all sessions, but recordings might not be available for all sessions", and heatmaps render from "the sample impression on which the heat map is created." Capture is unsampled; what you can watch and see is not guaranteed one-to-one.
4. It watches; it doesn't wake you up. The only documented notifications are an email when traffic drops more than 50% week-over-week, and an opt-in digest. No metric thresholds, no Slack, no PagerDuty, no webhooks. JavaScript problems surface as error clicks — a behavioural signal, not an error tracker: no grouping, no stack traces, no source maps. And there's no per-user deletion: "You need to delete the entire project to delete user's data" — an awkward answer to a GDPR erasure request.
The price of free is the data relationship
This is the part almost nobody reads, and it's the most consequential. Every paid tool on this page — Contentsquare, Crazy Egg, Lucky Orange, Mouseflow, Mtrix — signs a processor agreement: they process your visitors' data on your instructions, for your purposes only.
Clarity's Terms of Use say something different. §4.4(c)(i): "You and Microsoft are independent Controllers of the Personal Data Processed in connection with the Offering." And §4.4(c)(iii): Microsoft may use that data to "improve Microsoft's products and services", to "create user profiles for purposes that include advertising", and "in connection with artificial intelligence initiatives, such as training, fine-tuning, and evaluating machine learning models."
To be equally clear about what the terms do not say: "Clarity doesn't sell data" — that's Microsoft's FAQ, and it stands. Data sits in Azure; EU customers contract with Microsoft Ireland under SCCs; Clarity requires explicit consent in the EEA, UK and Switzerland, supports Global Privacy Control, suppresses page content by default, and its capture code is open source.
But the structure is what it is: free means Microsoft is a co-controller using your shoppers' behaviour for its own purposes, including advertising profiles and model training — stated in its own contract. For some brands that's a fair trade. For some boards it's a non-starter. Either way, it's a decision to make knowingly, not a footnote.
Clarity alternatives at a glance
| Tool | Best for | Runs experiments the pivot | Sees revenue | Data kept |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Microsoft Clarity | Free behaviour diagnostics at any traffic level | No test builder — filters tests run in another tool | Purchase % only (Shopify projects; checkout steps Plus-only) | Recordings 30 days ·aggregates 9 months |
| Contentsquare (what Hotjar became) | Teams wanting surveys + replay in one suite, with a real free tier | No — A/B testing appears under its integrations | Revenue goals sit on the quote-only Pro tier | Growth: replays 2 months ·other session data 13 months |
| Crazy Egg | Cheapest way to actually run a test | Yes — visual editor or URL redirect, unlimited tests, from its $99/mo tier | Conversion value only if your backend POSTs it via their API | Recordings 24 months |
| Lucky Orange | Watching and talking to shoppers live | No experimentation product in its lineup | Shopify purchase events auto-tracked; dollar values are ones you assign | Storage from 60 days; longer is a paid upgrade |
| Mouseflow | Form-level drop-off analysis | No — its own A/B guide starts by asking your testing tool for the variant | Modelled — "just set what a conversion is worth" | 1–12 months by tier |
| Mtrix | DTC brands that want the diagnosis, the test and the revenue in one product | Yes — A/B, multivariate, split URL, mask URL + bandit; no cap on any plan | Native — orders, line items and refunds; revenue per visitor on every experiment | Replays 1 month ·events & purchases 3 years |
Every competitor cell above traces to that vendor's own published pages, read 26 July 2026.
The alternatives, one honest paragraph each
1. Contentsquare — if you want the Hotjar-shaped suite
Hotjar no longer exists as a buyable product — hotjar.com's pricing page now redirects to Contentsquare, and every signup creates a Contentsquare account. The good news: Contentsquare's free tier is genuinely strong — 200,000 monthly sessions, funnels, error and performance monitoring, 100 survey responses a month, no card. Growth pricing starts at $39/mo billed annually ($49 monthly). The trade-offs: session-replay data on Growth is kept 2 months, revenue tracking sits on the quote-only Pro tier, and there's still no experimentation product — A/B testing appears under integrations. Choose it if you want surveys and voice-of-customer with your replay, which Clarity doesn't have — it's the most natural like-for-like upgrade. More depth: Hotjar alternatives and Contentsquare alternatives.
2. Crazy Egg — the cheapest real test you can run
The one tool in Clarity's price neighbourhood that actually runs experiments: a visual editor or URL redirect, chi-squared significance, sticky bucketing, unlimited tests from the $99/mo Plus tier (all plans billed annually). Recording retention is 24 months — the best in this set. The honest limits: its tests run client-side in the browser, collection pauses when you hit your tracked-pageview cap — mid-test if that's where you are — and order value only reaches it if your engineers send it through their conversion API. Choose it if you want to graduate from watching to testing for two figures a month, and your tests are page-content tests.
3. Lucky Orange — watch shoppers and talk to them
Live visitor view and live chat on every plan — genuinely unique in this set: you can watch a shopper struggle and message them mid-session. It auto-tracks Shopify's add-to-cart, checkout and purchase events, and its paid ladder runs from $19/mo (Shopify app) to $839+/mo. No experimentation product; the dollar figures in its Visit Value reports are values you assign, not order totals it read. Choose it if support-meets-CRO is your gap and you're on Shopify.
4. Mouseflow — for form analytics
Field-level drop-off, blank-field and refill analysis — the best form analytics in this price band, plus six heatmap types and friction scoring. Paid plans from $25/mo billed annually ($39 monthly). Its own A/B-testing guide describes segmenting tests that come from another tool, and when the monthly session allowance runs out, "all tracking will stop until your next refill date." Choose it if long or complex forms are where your revenue leaks.
5. Mtrix — when the diagnosis needs to become a shipped fix
Mtrix is the platform answer, and it's a different category, so here is the plain version.
On the store you already have — one script or npm package — Mtrix runs session replay at 100% capture with rage-click, dead-click and form-abandonment detection, analytics where events and purchases are kept for three years, click and scroll heatmaps by device, error tracking that groups four thousand occurrences into one issue, real-user Core Web Vitals — and experiments: A/B, multivariate, split URL and mask URL, with bandit allocation, no cap on any plan, and a first test configurable and live in about five minutes. The loop Clarity can't close — see it, test it, read the revenue — happens in one product.
Two things Clarity's privacy section made you care about: Mtrix operates as a processor, under your instructions, and hosting region is customer-selectable — EU by default. SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001 certified, with GDPR and CCPA/CPRA compliance programmes. Passwords, card numbers, CVV, SSN and auth tokens are detected by type and name and masked before they leave the browser.
The honest counterweights: Mtrix's replay retention is 1 month — Clarity-ballpark, not Crazy-Egg-ballpark; the three-year window is on events and purchases. There is no free tier — Mtrix runs one month free, no credit card, then it's paid at the platform tier. And there's no native mobile-app SDK. Choose it if you're a DTC brand where a percentage point of conversion is worth more than the subscription, and the wiring between your five current tools has become your actual problem.
When to stay on Clarity
No hedging:
- You need to see where people click, and that's the whole job. Clarity does that job well, free, forever. Stay.
- You're under ~$1M revenue. Spend the tooling budget on traffic. Clarity + Shopify Analytics is a complete stack at that stage.
- You need in-app mobile replay. Clarity has native SDKs; Mtrix doesn't.
- Your testing needs are occasional and page-level. Clarity + Crazy Egg at $99/mo covers you for a fraction of a platform subscription.
Move when the walls above are costing you real money: a test backlog you can't run, a revenue question your tools answer with a percentage, a peak season you can no longer watch, or a data-controller clause your counsel won't sign.